Andre," the signature "_Vandeuvre_." In these irrelevant (and
unsolicited) interpolations, I take no interest. But who was Mlle. de
Mons? As Frederick Locker sings:
Did She live yesterday or ages back?
What colour were the eyes when bright and waking?
And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black,
Poor little Head! that long has done with aching![1]
"Ages back" she certainly did _not_ live, for the book is dated "1637,"
and "yesterday" is absurd. But that her eyes were bright,--nay, that
they were particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in the
sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred years afterwards, I am
"confidous"--as Mrs. Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality a
foregone conclusion which I shrink from dispersing by any practical
resolvent) is, that Mile. de Mons was some delightful
seventeenth--century French child, to whom the big volume had been
presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert, strait-corseted
little figure, with ribboned hair, eagerly craning across the tall
folio; and following curiously with her finger the legends under the
copper "figures,"--"Narcisse en fleur," "Ascalaphe en hibou," "Jason
endormant le dragon,"--and so forth, with much the same wonder that the
Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred in the little Dutchwomen
of Middelburg.
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